Ah that does seem stressful. I do appreciate that you moderate here though, HN is much better for it!

AOL used to charge by the hour, and discovered an unintended side effect when they switched to flat-rate pricing. Mods in the ancien regime had been compensated by getting free online time, but under the new system, that became worthless, and there was a wave of mods quitting because somewhere-around-minimum-wage had been sufficient compensation for the double binds before, but they weren't about to volunteer to deal with the worst of forums.

The similar battle in newspaper and television included heavy moderation and legislation to limit this. E.g., do you think the Wall Street Journal was regularly publishing letters to the editor that focused on the arguments for abolishing private property?

The only legal question unique to social media is the 230 provision that protects a platform from legal action from third parties due to hosting user-generated content. That is still an open question. Social media companies always have the option to apply stringent moderation and declare themselves a publisher. They could even do this selectively. E.g., a newspaper with an online presence still receives 230 protection for user generated comments on an article when there is a clear denotation differentiating what is published by the site and what is user generated.

I suppose there's a very obvious analogy to baseball and mutual dislike of the umpire.